Yeah, I plugged a NUC into my TV, installed Pop OS on it, and got a Pepper Jobs USB gyro-remote to control it, and it instantly upgraded my living room.
I previously used my PS4 for watching everything, but having a full desktop OS is just way better: I can browse the web on my TV, control it remotely with my laptop's keyboard and mouse using Barrier, open multiple live feeds in picture-in-picture mode, play music in the background of whatever I'm watching, etc. Also, when I'm watching sports and they go to a side-by-side commercial break, I use the zoom accessibility feature to zoom in on the tiny live feed so I can watch that full screen without seeing any ads haha.
I'd be curious to know more about how you configured KDE. I run a pretty vanilla Pop OS setup right now, which is more usable than I expected with my USB remote, but I've been meaning to explore how to set up something more "smart TV"-like that's a bit easier to navigate. My initial thought was to write a browser extension or a custom app with an embedded browser, but that feels like a bit too much work for something that's supposed to be a leisure/entertainment setup.
Basically I removed all of the default panels and setup desktop widgets. The launcher widget is the most used. Within it I created custom launchers to open a web browser in full screen mode directed to a particular site like Netflix, YouTube, Prime Video etc. and downloaded icons for it. Other widgets I use is a task tray, weather widget, clock, external HD manager and power. I also found that I had to add the volume widget to get the volume controls on my USB remote to work for some reason.
I also configured font sizes, cursor size and mouse acceleration for usability. It works really well.
I previously used my PS4 for watching everything, but having a full desktop OS is just way better: I can browse the web on my TV, control it remotely with my laptop's keyboard and mouse using Barrier, open multiple live feeds in picture-in-picture mode, play music in the background of whatever I'm watching, etc. Also, when I'm watching sports and they go to a side-by-side commercial break, I use the zoom accessibility feature to zoom in on the tiny live feed so I can watch that full screen without seeing any ads haha.
I'd be curious to know more about how you configured KDE. I run a pretty vanilla Pop OS setup right now, which is more usable than I expected with my USB remote, but I've been meaning to explore how to set up something more "smart TV"-like that's a bit easier to navigate. My initial thought was to write a browser extension or a custom app with an embedded browser, but that feels like a bit too much work for something that's supposed to be a leisure/entertainment setup.